The Power of Teaching

In the preface to his On Christian Doctrine, St. Augustine answers objections to his intention to give rules for interpreting scripture. The objections are.

  1. People can’t understand his rules.
  2. People can understand his rules but can’t understand the scripture they apply them to.
  3. People can interpret scripture without his rules and thus say that no one needs rules.

St. Augustine says that the objectors in Camps 1 and 2 need to pray to God for sight. Their inability to see does not make St. Augustine’s project worthless. The objectors in Camp 3, however, get ST. Augustine’s sternest rebuke, mainly because their objection comes from pride. In answering their objection, St. Augustine makes clear the role that human teaching plays in our relationship to not only scripture, but the world. Here it is…

But if any one thinks that these stories are false, I do not strongly insist on them. For, as I am dealing with Christians who profess to understand the Scriptures without any directions from man (and if the fact be so, they boast of a real advantage, and one of no ordinary kind), they must surely grant that every one of us learnt his own language by hearing it constantly from childhood, and that any other language we have learnt,–Greek, or Hebrew, or any of the rest,–we have learnt either in the same way, by hearing it spoken, or from a human teacher. Now, then, suppose we advise all our brethren not to teach their children any of these things, because on the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the apostles immediately began to speak the language of every race; and warn every one who has not had a like experience that he need not consider himself a Christian, or may at least doubt whether he has yet received the Holy Spirit? No, no; rather let us put away false pride and learn whatever can be learnt from man; and let him who teaches another communicate what he has himself received without arrogance and without jealousy. And do not let us tempt Him in whom we have believed, lest, being ensnared by such wiles of the enemy and by our own perversity, we may even refuse to go to the churches to hear the gospel itself, or to read a book, or to listen to another reading or preaching, in the hope that we shall be carried up to the third heaven, “whether in the body or out of the body,” as the apostle says,(1) and there hear unspeakable words, such as it is not lawful for man to utter, or see the Lord Jesus Christ and hear the gospel from His own lips rather than from those of men.

Five things:

  1. Everyone has learned some crucial component of their existence from someone else. Language is just one potent example.
  2. We should not doubt the salvation of someone who learned to do something spiritual via the instruction of man.
  3. The very thing that made the spiritual instruction possible–language–was not taught to the objector by the Spirit of God alone. Some of it came from man.
  4. By this same logic, objectors should never enter a church since spiritual matters will inevitably be mediated for them there.
  5. This is really the problem: these objectors want unmediated knowledge, direct access to the lips of the Lord rather than to the lips of the Lord’s messengers. This is incredibly prideful and mimics the problem Eve and Adam ran into in the garden.